Bill Sharman, Hall of Fame basketball coach and player for Celtics and Lakers, dies at 87

Bill Sharman

Jayne Kamin-Oncea / US PRESSWIRE

Los Angeles Lakers former coach Bill Sharman before the start of the press conference held by the Magic Johnson foundation at the Staples Center.

Los Angeles Lakers former coach Bill Sharman before the start of the press conference held by the Magic Johnson foundation at the Staples Center. (Jayne Kamin-Oncea / US PRESSWIRE)

Jerry Crowe

Bill Sharman, a Hall of Fame basketball player and coach who guided the Lakers to their first National Basketball Assn. title in Los Angeles in record-setting fashion, has died. He was 87.

Sharman, who coached teams to championships in three professional leagues and also played professional baseball, died Friday at his home in Redondo Beach, said his wife, Joyce. He had suffered a stroke last weekend.

He collected 15 championship rings as a player, coach, general manager, team president and special consultant, serving in all capacities but player in more than 35 years with the Lakers. As a coach, he introduced the bane of night-owl players everywhere, the morning shoot-around on game day.

Sharman was elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as a player in 1976 and as a coach in 2004, joining John Wooden and Lenny Wilkens as the only men honored in both roles. In 1996 he was selected as one of the 50 greatest players of the NBA's first 50 years.

His 1971-72 Lakers, featuring Chamberlain, West and Gail Goodrich and considered one of the greatest NBA teams ever assembled, won a staggering 33 consecutive games, a U.S. professional sports record, on the way to the championship. But Sharman sacrificed his voice by overusing it that season after he had been diagnosed with laryngitis, and he never fully recovered.

Cousy, his Celtic teammate, once called Sharman "the best athlete I've ever played with, or against," and Wooden, his friend, wrote in a recommendation letter, "If Bill Sharman isn't in the Hall of Fame as a coach, no one should be."

As a player, the 6-foot-1 Sharman was a high-scoring guard and hard-nosed defender — "He got into more fights than Mike Tyson," West once remarked — but probably will be remembered most for his uncanny free-throw shooting. He made 88.3% of his free throws, seven times leading the league in free-throw percentage.

"Bill Sharman with the basketball at the free throw line was a sports work of art," Jim Murray, the late Times columnist, wrote in 1994. "Ruth with a fastball, Cobb with a base open. Dempsey with his man on the ropes. Hogan with a long par three. Jones with a short putt. Caruso with a high C. Hope in a 'Road' movie. Shoemaker on the favorite. Sinatra with Gershwin.

"When it was Sharman at the line, the next sound you heard was swish! It was as foregone as the sun setting."

Sharman made the transition to coaching when he was hired in 1961 as a player/coach with the L.A. Jets of the American Basketball League. They folded midseason, officially ending his playing career, and he led the Cleveland Pipers to the ABL title in 1961-62, earning lifetime respect from Steinbrenner, the team's fledgling owner.

"You always were a winner and you're still a winner," the owner of the New York Yankees wrote in a letter to his old coach after Sharman's election to the Hall of Fame in 2004.

The ABL folded, and Sharman coached Cal State L.A. for two seasons and the NBA's San Francisco Warriors for two years, then in 1968 he became coach the L.A. Stars of the new American Basketball Assn.

In the 1970-71 season, Sharman guided the relocated Utah Stars to the ABA championship.

But he posted his crowning achievement in coaching a year later.

Hired by Cooke to coach the Lakers in the summer of 1971, he inherited a title-starved team that was considered past its prime after years of frustrating near-misses.

The Lakers had moved from Minneapolis to Los Angeles in 1960. Seven times between 1962 and 1970, the team had reached the NBA Finals without winning, losing to the Celtics six times in the championship series.

But under Sharman's guidance, the Lakers produced a season for the ages. He encouraged a team game, emphasizing balanced scoring and tireless defense. And he let them run.

Only once did they fail to score more than 100 points, and they averaged 121 points a game. They defeated the Golden State Warriors by 63 points in one game, then the widest margin in league history, and for more than two months, from early November to early January, they did not lose, their 33-game winning streak finally ended by the Bucks in Milwaukee, 120-104.

"The funny thing is, a lot of those games weren't even close," Sharman said of the winning streak. "It was just an amazing stretch."

The Lakers' 69-13 record that season was the best in NBA history until the Chicago Bulls, led by Michael Jordan, went 72-10 in the 1995-96 season. In the NBA Finals, the Lakers defeated the New York Knicks, four games to one.

West led the league in assists and Chamberlain was tops in rebounding. Forwards Jim McMillian, who replaced the retired Elgin Baylor, and Happy Hairston helped trigger the fast break with their rebounding. Guard Gail Goodrich shot the lights out. And everybody played defense. "I've been on other teams that set records," Chamberlain said. "Everything is forgotten if you don't win it all."

The '71-72 team had players who were willing to give up personal glory for shared success.

"Sharman brought a more team-oriented concept," Goodrich said in 2003. "While the Lakers had great players before, in many ways they relied too much on those great players."

Goodrich was the top scorer on that team, but by only a tenth of a point, 25.9 points per game to West's 25.8.

"If Jerry West wanted to, he could have been the leading scorer on our team, maybe even in the whole league," Sharman said nearly 25 years later. "Wilt could have led the league in scoring. But everybody sacrificed for the team."

Even so, the players liked Sharman.

"I always say he was the easiest coach I ever played for in that he told you what he wanted and demanded of you, and that was it," West said in 2004 when Sharman was inducted into the hall of fame as coach.

Added West, now on the executive board of the Golden State Warriors, "I think the biggest thing in this league is there's a right coach for the right team and the right personnel, and Bill was certainly the right coach for us."

Born William Walton Sharman on May 25, 1926, in Abilene, Texas, he grew up in Lomita before moving to Porterville in the San Joaquin Valley after his father took over a Los Angeles Examiner newspaper distributorship there.

Sharman won 15 varsity letters at Porterville High, excelling not only in basketball but football, baseball, tennis, track and boxing. One day in 1944 he won the discus throw and shotput in a morning track meet, took the San Joaquin Valley tennis title in the afternoon, then pitched the baseball team to victory in the evening.

After a short Navy stint, he was a two-time All-American and Pacific Coast Conference basketball player of the year at USC.

A good enough outfielder to have been drafted by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1950, he played professional baseball for five years. Called up to the major leagues at the end of the 1951 season, he watched from the dugout as Bobby Thomson of the New York Giants hit the "shot heard 'round the world," beating the Dodgers in a pennant playoff.

But Sharman, to his regret, never made it as a major leaguer. Basketball was his forte.

Drafted by the Washington Capitols, he became an eight-time All-Star with the Celtics, averaging 17.8 points a game and winning four titles during an 11-year NBA career.

Midway through his career, he also hatched the idea for what is now a staple of NBA life — the morning shoot-around. At a high school gym outside Boston, he worked out in the early hours before night games, trying to burn off nervous energy.

"I would just go to the gym and take a few shots, but I noticed that I suddenly felt fresher and more confident during games," he told the Boston Globe in 2004. "So I started doing it for all the games. And my performance was much better."

After making about 85% of his free throws in his first five seasons with the Celtics, Sharman made 90.3% in his last five. His scoring average also jumped and he decided then that if he ever coached, he would spread the word.

Team-wide shoot-arounds didn't become a fixture, however, until after Sharman took over the Lakers and convinced Chamberlain of their merits.

"You know I don't like to get up early in the morning," Chamberlain told Sharman, but he agreed to give it a try if he saw that it helped the team.

The Lakers' long winning streak and subsequent title made shoot-arounds a fixture.

Sharman took the Lakers to the NBA Finals again in 1973, when the Knicks unseated them as champions, and coached for three more seasons before his voice, reduced to a whisper, made it all but impossible for him to continue.

He took over as general manager of the Lakers and, through eight more championship seasons, also served as team president and special consultant.

"I think Bill brought an attitude here," West told The Times in 1988 when Sharman stepped down as team president. "He brought an attitude of work and dedication, and an intensity. In his quiet, nice way he [as coach] instilled in us that we were a better team than the people we played against. We didn't have that before."

Sharman is survived by Joyce, his third wife; sons Jerry and Tom; daughters Nancy Scott and Janice Hand; six grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.